From extreme drought to super storms, many wonder what the future holds for the climate of the eastern United States. A study conducted by researchers at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, does away with the guessing.

Results show the region will be hotter and wetter.

Joshua Fu, a civil and environmental engineering professor, and Yang Gao, a graduate research assistant, developed precise scales of cities which act as a climate crystal ball seeing high resolution climate changes almost 50 years into the future.

The study found that heat waves will become more severe in most regions of the eastern United States and, that both the Northeast and Southeast will see a drastic increase in precipitation.

The findings are published in the Nov. 6 edition of Environmental Research Letters.

Harnessing the supercomputing power of UT’s Kraken and Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s (ORNL) Jaguar (now Titan, the fastest in the world), the researchers combined high-resolution topography, land use information and climate modeling. Then they used dynamical downscaling to develop their climate model results. Dynamical downscaling allowed the researchers to develop climate scales as small as four square kilometers.

“Instead of studying regions, which is not useful when examining extreme weather, dynamical downscaling allows us to study small areas such as cities with a fine resolution,” said Fu, who is also a professor within the UT-ORNL Bredesen Center for Interdisciplinary Research and Graduate Education (CIRE).

The researchers evaluated extreme events along with daily maximum and minimum temperatures and daily precipitation. For the 23 states east of the Mississippi River, they analyzed the present-day climate from 2001 to 2004 and predicted the future climate from 2057 to 2059. This is the first study to predict heat waves for the top 20 cities in the eastern U.S. For example, Nashville will see a temperature rise of 3.21 degrees Celsius and Memphis will see a rise of 2.18 degrees Celsius.

In comparing present climate to future, the researchers found that heat waves will become more severe throughout the eastern part of the nation. The Northeast and eastern Midwest will experience a greater increase in heat waves than the Southeast, which will almost equalize the temperatures between the future North and current South.

“Currently, the mean heat wave duration is about four days in the Northeast and eastern Midwest and five days in the Southeast,” said Fu. “By the end of the 2050s, the Northeast and eastern Midwest will be gaining on the Southeast by increasing two days.”

In addition, the Northeast and eastern Midwest are likely to suffer from steeper increases in the severity of heat waves.

“While the Southeast has the highest intensity in heat waves, the northeast is likely to experience the highest increase,” said Fu. “We are looking at temperature increases of 3 to 5 degrees Celsius, with New York experiencing the highest hike.”

Both the Northeast and Southeast will experience an increase of precipitation of 35 percent or more. Most coastal states will see the greatest increase, of about 150 millimeters a year. Taking into consideration heat waves and extreme precipitation, the Northeast shows the largest increases in precipitation. This suggests a greater risk of flooding.

“It is important that the nation take actions to mitigate the impact of climate change in the next several decades,” said Fu. “These changes not only cost money—about a billion a year in the U.S.—but they also cost lives.”

###

Fu and Gao collaborated with researchers at Emory University and the National Center for Atmospheric Research. They received assistance from the National Center for Computational Sciences, the UT-ORNL Joint Institute for Computational Sciences and UT’s National Institute for Computational Sciences.

UPDATE: I forgot to mention, that when they get this supercomputer online at Oak Ridge, it will take even more guesswork out of climate and weather prediction. – Anthony

“For the 23 states east of the Mississippi River, they analyzed the present-day climate from 2001 to 2004 and predicted the future climate from 2057 to 2059.”

Let me see if I have this straight. They analysed 4 years of “climate” and then proceeded to project out fifty years into the future, to a precision of 0.1 C. Yeah…yeah…I could see how that could work…

“Harnessing the supercomputing power of UT’s Kraken and Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s (ORNL) Jaguar (now Titan, the fastest in the world)…”
together with
“…dynamical downscaling to develop their climate model results.”

Why 50 years? If they can be so accurate in 50 years with just 4 years of data, surely they could produce something in the 10 year range? You know, something that could be shown to be true one way or another before all their pay cheques have been cashed and they’re sitting on their derrier’s collecting retirement benefits and being smug about how they ripped of the public with research so blatantly fictional that their administration is too embarrassed to call them out on it for fear of being asked how the h*ll is was allowed to be published in the first place.

“For the 23 states east of the Mississippi River, they analyzed the present-day climate from 2001 to 2004 and predicted the future climate from 2057 to 2059.”
=====
It must be true. They used a supercomputer!

I wonder if their program would be able to accurately predict the climate for 1957 to 1959 using the data for 1901 to 1904? I sincerely doubt it.

How about a snow/rain/drought/flood/hot/cold snow globe with a secret selector dial to show these different conditions – Then the likes of Joshua Fu and Yang Gao, can always say they are and they will be right with a flick of a secret switch.
We could have one in every climate department grant seeking university and of course a huge one in the Ministry of Truth (EPA/UN) located in the grand entrance hall.
Who could argue with such irrefutable evidence?

This graph is the distribution of daily max temps 1893-2011. Top temps are not as high as the 1930’s and show no upward trend (although, as with most of these things, temps are higher than the colder 1960’s + 70’s)

The faith that people have in what comes out of a computer is stunning. But this is nothing new. I wrote my first computer programs in 1980 and was surprised then as to how people simply trusted any result that a computer produced.

Just as long as when these alarmist predictions fail to materialise the fools get shown the door and have to retake their PhDs…
Some sort of responsibility and accountability should be expected after all.

In other news, European researchers quietly announce simultaneously the discovery of the Higgs Boson and demonstration of continuous cold-fusion. A spokesman for the researchers said, “We have supercomputers, too.”

Looks to me that all UT has done is to describe hotter Urban Heat Islands. They speak of the cities as being hotter. What about the countryside? Will the rural areas 50 miles upwind of the cities be any hotter according to this study?

Don’t these people ever give up? Who sets the homework there? All that computer power and they come up with this bilge. I’d have thought going for maximum points on Far Cry 3 would be better use of the facilities.

Well, at least they were smart enough not to predict anything we can check in the next 10 years. That is the real lesson of James Hansen; don’t make any predictions that can be checked during your professional lifetime.

“…they analyzed the present-day climate from 2001 to 2004 and predicted the future climate from 2057 to 2059…”
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
If they can predict 2057 to 2059 how come they can not predict 2013 to 2015? My guess is because predicting 2013 to 2015 or 2015 to 2020 well leave their arse hanging in the breeze when they are soon proved wrong. However by going 45 years into the future they will be retired (or dead) and won’t give a rat’s behind that they are proved wrong.

Its a total misunderstanding of Computer Modeling with datas from only some years to Look Long years in the Future. Its total nonsense. The Same is valid for all this Junk Science for Extreme temperature increase by 5 and more degrees Celsius in Europe in the next 60 years.

It is claims such as these, in conjunction with recent claims relating to extreme weather events, that has made me conclude that climate science is presently a junk science field.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Let me correct that statement for you“…hat has made me conclude that climate science is actually ALCHEMY …”

The occult school of alchemy didn’t turn into the science of chemistry until alchemists abandoned the practice of secrecy and instead started sharing results with each other and checking each other’s experiments.

Interesting that Fu says: “These changes not only cost money—about a billion a year in the U.S.—but they also cost lives.”

“about a billion a year”, that’s two Solyndras. That’s massively less than is spent on ‘climate” research each year. If this guy can’t get orders of magnitude right in his press release, why should his article be better?

Also, what lives? More people die from cold than heat. How many heat related deaths in Las Vegas where summer time temps can top 115 F?

This prediction is an illustration of a dominance of style over content. Usage of a supercomputer or not is in itself insignificant next to the astronomical inaccuracy resulting from extrapolating from 4 years, but, by saying they used a supercomputer, a giant pile of GIGO impresses the naive. On topics flooded by environmental activists, for who flocks to employment at the corresponding institutions, what the “peer review” process primarily consists of really is just ensuring a formal style of writing and presentation to
give the illusion of authority, so few question assumptions (plus, of course, weeding out presentation of unpopular inconvenient results).

Often data isn’t even uploaded for verification, nor does a single person do solid critical review of content (as opposed to superficial style) for years if ever; the history of Mann’s hockey stick paper is an example.

For instance, in one of many other examples, the Doran & Zimmerman 97% concensus paper was patently BS if actually read by a moderately intelligent unbiased person, with it concluding that debate about CAGW is over because 74 of 76 climatologists answered yes to 2 trick questions of whether temperatures increased since the pre-1800s (since the crippling cold of the Little Ice Age) and whether humans have a significant effect on temperature (where significant in a scientific sense essentially means just non-zero, from a garbage bag on someone’s lawn to Urban Heat Islands). Take away the formal style of writing; don’t imply “peer review” means much; and it is just something said by a couple dumb and/or dishonest activist guys. They went to college, but anybody who has gone to college knows it doesn’t magically make everyone with a degree never lie about anything for the rest of their life. (There is not even any strong reason to conclude they didn’t just make up their numbers, although the questions are so slanted that they probably didn’t need to do so). But the style is enough for fools to auto-trust and the media to present it as authoritative, carefully never mentioning the specifics of the actual questions.

Someday I would like to find out what kids are being taught in schools today about “peer review,” or whether the false memes about it are coming primarily from the media, or both.

Much of advancement of true science occurred before modern journal-based “peer review” arose in recent decades. Abuse of the label by many who don’t deserve the term “scientists” is a growing problem. (Someone like Dr. Feynman or Dr. Shaviv does; not so much these guys).

“Currently, the mean heat wave duration is about four days in the Northeast and eastern Midwest and five days in the Southeast,” said Fu. “By the end of the 2050s, the Northeast and eastern Midwest will be gaining on the Southeast by increasing two days.”

Oh NOOOOOO!!!!!!! Six whole days of heat wave rather than four by 2050? Why aren’t we destroying our entire economy and standard of living to prevent this!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Garbage in is garbage out!!!!
There is an experiment that proves that the Greenhouse gas effect does not exist. This experiment which has been technologically reviewed by Ph.D physicists (at least 4). Ph.D. Chemical engineers (at least 2 at last count) and others Ph. D’s in other fields The experiment is found on the web-site http:// http://www.slayingtheskydragon.com click on the blog tab then on page 3 of 12. . It is titled “The Experiment that failed which can save the world trillions-Proving the greenhouse gas effect does not exist”

The Greenhouse Effect Explored
Written by Carl Brehmer | 26 May 2012
Is “Water Vapor Feedback” Positive or Negative?
Exploiting the medium of Youtube Carl Brehmer is drawing wider attention to a fascinating experiment he performed to test the climatic impacts of water in our atmosphere.
Carl explains, “An essential element of the “greenhouse effect” hypothesis is the positive “water vapor feedback” hypothesis. That is, if something causes an increase in the temperature this will cause an increase in the evaporation of water into water vapor.”

Another important website is www. The Great Climate Clash.com -G3 The Greenhouse gas effect does not exist.

I asked my rare, antique and collectible magic eightball if this study was legit. I shook it fifty-three times to simulate independent computer runs. The robust answer it gave was: “Not at this time”.
Go figure.

Every year we have a spate of regional alarms of climate catastrophe coinciding with the new Congressional class. There will be one for every region. In my State the seashore will no longer be habitable. Sand beaches will be a thing of the past, and we will have no industry. But some money to the wailers will help. And Americans must change their evil life style, or at least those that are not part of the elite, who must maintain their ‘carbon footprint’, ie wealth, for the benitfit of all.

“This is the first study to predict heat waves for the top 20 cities in the eastern U.S. For example, Nashville will see a temperature rise of 3.21 degrees Celsius and Memphis will see a rise of 2.18 degrees Celsius.”

That’s an awful lot of significant digits for a prediction 50 years in the future. A range and/or error bars would have been much, much more appropriate for a study like this even though they would be based on the same fantasyland projection.

December 17, 2012 at 12:11 pm
I tried Eric H.’s 8 ball, and it is ‘definite’ that a cane toad will win the 2013 Grand National Steeplechase [4+ miles, over forminable fences, with the animals carrying at least 10 stone [140 pounds, or about 64 Kg]].
And that, too, is the revealed truth.

Steve C says:

December 17, 2012 at 11:22 am
Quite right. The 8 ball and I both concur.

Seriously, if I tried a stunt like this by Fu & Gao – a cupid stunt – in my job in the private sector, I would be seeking employment by nighfall.

beesaman says:

December 17, 2012 at 11:09 am

Just as long as when these alarmist predictions fail to materialise the fools get shown the door and have to retake their PhDs…
Some sort of responsibility and accountability should be expected after all.

But accountabilityand responsibility do not exist in the wider public sector [Government, academia, what we in the UK call QUANGOes – quasi-governmental organisations, much of public education, th civil service, the BBC, etc.]
. And these citizens have votes, and access to the media [quite rightly, but do they alwasys promote what is best for the country – or for themselves?].

….These clowns deserve a place in the Guinness Book of Records for the silliest “science” of all time.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
I do not know, they have a heck of a lot of competition these days.

“This is the first study to predict heat waves for the top 20 cities in the eastern U.S. For example, Nashville will see a temperature rise of 3.21 degrees Celsius and Memphis will see a rise of 2.18 degrees Celsius.”

That’s an awful lot of significant digits for a prediction 50 years in the future. A range and/or error bars would have been much, much more appropriate….
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>..
Here I will add them for you.“….a temperature rise of 3.21 degrees Celsius +0.00/-13.21 and Memphis will see a rise of 2.18 degrees Celsius +0.82/-12.18.” This scientifically based on THIS data.

Next time someone tells me the models are credible, I can point them to this!

So… if the “present day” is 2001-2004, how accurate is their 2011-2014 prediction? Just wondering. It’s funny, because both the “researchers” and “reporters” seem to be taking this seriously, as if it is some sort of valid achievement.

“Manfred says:
December 17, 2012 at 10:52 am
“Harnessing the supercomputing power of UT’s Kraken and Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s (ORNL) Jaguar (now Titan, the fastest in the world)…”
together with
“…dynamical downscaling to develop their climate model results.”

Gosh! Words fail me.”

Agreed – but do you know what is truly sad about all this. That some genuine scientists haven’t had access to these computers because these two arse-holes are time wasters.

So 2001-2004 predicts 2057-2059. Since I am most concerned about the next 3 years, 2013-2015, shouldn’t their Super Computer models be able to use Climate data from the 1957-1960 window to tell me this? And to demonstrate their model accuracy, since the data from 2008-2010 has probably been verified and archived, can’t we see how good the fit was based on the 1952-1955 window?

RIF
reading is fundamental
“Currently, the mean heat wave duration is about four days in the Northeast and eastern Midwest and five days in the Southeast,” said Fu. “By the end of the 2050s, the Northeast and eastern Midwest will be gaining on the Southeast by increasing two days.”

Oh NOOOOOO!!!!!!! Six whole days of heat wave rather than four by 2050? Why aren’t we destroying our entire economy and standard of living to prevent this!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
#########
mean heat wave DURATION. not total heat wave days which is much larger.
the mean heat wave DURATION will increase by two days.
Heat wave Duration is a real killer. Basically as the heat wave gets longer the tmin continues to rise. Today nearly 40 cities in the world operate a heat wave warning system. looking at the historical data for chicao and looking at excess deaths, its pretty clear that

A) there are more than 4 days of heat wave during the summer.
B) the mean heat wave duration is around 4.
C) the longer the heave wave the more people die.

Reading is fundamental. Part of this is brain dead simple and you dont need a super computer to give you a sense of the increased heat waves IFF temperature goes up. One can simply scale temperature and get an answer roughly the same as theirs.

The solutions, however, need not rely on mitigation ( cutting carbon) in fact anything we do now is not likely to effect weather on 2050. Adaptation in the form of better heat wave warning and changes to cities like cool pavements, porous pavements, white and green roofs, and cooling centers for the elderly will reduce deaths. We should be doing that regardless of what climate science says or does not say

Joshua Fu, a civil and environmental engineering professor, not at all interested in environmental outcomes, and Yang Gao, his stooge say that the world is going to hell in a handbasket, and only their particular services can save it.

We in Aust have had Tim Flannery, a ‘Climate Commissioner’ make predictions regarding rainfall that did not pan out. Rather than fall on his sword when reminded of his predictions and their failure, he reverts to stating that his quotes have been taken out of context.

He reminds us that he said ‘all things being equal’ there will be further droughts/unfilled dams/need for desalination plants/the sky is falling. What he says he meant is that if the exact same conditions occur in the future that are occurring when he makes his ‘predictions’, then what he says will come true. The fact that climate is always changing did not seem to enter into his ‘predictions’. His scaremongering and the effects of his catastrophic announcements on the populace don’t worry him. The money expended based on his doom and gloom view

Perhaps these new ‘predictions’ will also be explained when they don’t occur with statements of ‘we used the best science available’, ‘things changed that we could not have known at the time’, any other excuse for being so certain but not being right.

There’s nothing new in politics. Charles Babbage (1791-1871), when asked by Members of Parliament if his difference engine (mechanical computer) would still provide the right answers even if the wrong figures were entered, replied, “I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.”

This is very good news indeed.
This tremendous leap in climate prediction and forecasting capabilities will overcome a very, very long standing problem for the farming community particularly in Australia with our highly variable climate and rainfall.
These scientists will now be able to very accurately predict and forecast for us, the amount of critical rainfall and when we will get it for our grain growing programs next [ southern ] winter and no doubt all the winters following just by using the super computers on the precipitation outcomes of a few years ago.
No more very expensive fertilizers and chemicals and ground preparation when we can now be told when a dry year or drought is coming many years or even decades ahead. And the new machinery brought and the house improvements made when we know absolutely that the seasons a few years ahead will be wet, warm and bumper crop years.
And just imagine how major events like the Olympics. national and international football games, winter snow sporting events, political events and so many other major events of every type can be programmed years or even decades ahead to be located in cities where the predictions of these scientists say that the weather at that time, based on some 4 years of weather and climate data from a half century beforehand will be eminently suitable for such events.

The mind swoons at such immense possibilities in predicting the future weather and climate opened up by the research efforts of these gentlemen.
Much more and very generous funding should immediately be made available to these researchers.

Damn! [/SARC ] or is it [ /CRAP ] just doesn’t seem to quite cover this development!

Anyone tracking these absurdities on (say) a quarterly basis, just to ensure that the usual Green Gang gobblygook doesn’t ooze too freely through the cracks? What statisticians genially term “the fallacy of inferred precision” is so rampant here that a teaser interval or two would be extremely apropos.

Would anyone care to take a bet that all the Green super computers are being used outside office hours by avid green gamers who are the same ones who move with impossible speed in the pvp shoot em ups and really spoil your fun?

Lets us pick a period of just 3/4 years from an El Nino to La Nina plus another forming and extrapolate that in future for a similar period in 50 years. Therefore because of the weather changes between El NIno and La Nina the illustration below shows regions are going to get much more severe. (mainly colder, wetter and drier)

What a load of nonsense of course and all that has been done here is the change of weather from La Nina to El Nino and suggested this will worsen in future for a similar period in 50 years. Does it get any worse than this in climate pseudoscience, NO.

Difference above (mainly warmer, wetter and drier)

Hence, this model has based worse climate in future on just an ENSO change of weather in regions from La Nina to El Nino.

I read this PR last week and dismissed it as more wishful thinking and modeling craziness. I might suggest goat guts (or choose any animal you like) are probably as accurate as this model and all the computing power in the world won’t make up for the lack of understanding and assumptions that go into it.

I agree the press release is poorly written and even comical. But from the paper itself – freely available as someone else pointed out – it seems like the researchers are making some valuable progress in regional climate modeling. Whether warming is human caused or good or bad it is likely going to be helpful to have better regional modeling. This was the first paper to report on a new approach. So hopefully further work will give us a better idea of how useful it may be.

If people have any interest in science they might read the paper and then discuss it instead of making fun of a press release.

Mosh,
You have said that the idea of extreme climate is the new normal, the new consensus, and I see little effort on your part to resist that new hype. I agree with what you write above about heatwaves, except- why even reply rationally to absurd (and untestable) claims about weather conditions 50 years in the future. Academics, and I’ve been one, don’t deserve recognition for National Enquirer or Nostradamus type predictions. ROF is more appropriate for the BPU set.

The computers are always “correct”. The questioning is for the data and assumptions, the two things the MSM and liberal arts don’t understand has uncertainties. But they love computers. Just don’t understand them, either.

The GIGO thing doesn’t mean much to the lovers of Apple5, especially to Twitter/McKibben followers.

Funny! And statistics is even funnier! A statistic like mean heat wave duration is MEANINGLESS. Why? Because heat wave duration is bounded on the lower side by zero and not bounded on the upper side. So therefore the distribution for small values of heat wave DURATION would be what? Log Normal perhaps, or Weibull? You pick. In any regard the summary statistic for central tendency would not be the mean, more likely median. Small detail perhaps but hey, the devil’s always in the details especially for models that got out for decades with ridiculously small confidence intervals and significant figures.

And with that error I’m going to believe their computer model beyond 2057 for any proclamation? Tell me why I should based on this most elementary failure?

Regional climate understanding is a step in the right direction, but not in this way over a too short period from an La NIna to El Nino. This tells us nothing about the regional climates background behavior not influenced by El Nino or La NIna. Therefore it is impossible to use this in 50 years time and claim a solution.The best way to go about this is to show how regional climate in eastern USA behaves on the long term without ENSO influence.

On the other hand … maybe these guys are simply brilliant. By taking the results of GCMs to the next level they highlight the stupidity inherent in the belief in climate models. No one can seriously believe these results since no one can predict our weather more than a few days in the future. Instead of laughing at these guys we should be congratulating them on their insight.

Bangs head on desk repeatedly —– Arrrrgggggg
As mentioned above, how about a validity check please predict the weather on Tuesday, July 2 2013 in New York city with daytime peak temperature accurate to +/- .01 deg C

‘By the end of the 2050s’ when will both be dead and therefore be in no position to have the BS nature of our claims rammed down our throats . Meanwhile on the back of these claims we hopping to get another buck load of research funding and perhaps an invite to one of those ‘beach front ‘ environmental conferences where for minim work we can enjoy a few days of luxury with the bills picked up by the suckers of Joe public . the Northeast and eastern Midwest will be gaining on the Southeast by increasing two days.”

“The solutions, however, need not rely on mitigation ( cutting carbon) in fact anything we do now is not likely to effect weather on 2050. Adaptation in the form of better heat wave warning and changes to cities like cool pavements, porous pavements, white and green roofs, and cooling centers for the elderly will reduce deaths. We should be doing that regardless of what climate science says or does not say”

I entirely agree with everything Mr Mosher says in the above paragraph and would add only that similar provision be made for the effects of cold spells.

If rising temperatures mean the Great Lakes are not frozen solid in winter, think of the economic benefits to cities like Chicago and the US in general.

As thing are now, a large portion of the mid-west economy needs to shut down during the winter. What would it mean to the mid-west if instead of one crop a year they could plant two as happens in Mexico and southern California?

Bob Kutz says:
December 17, 2012 at 11:47 am
Well, at least they were smart enough not to predict anything we can check in the next 10 years. That is the real lesson of James Hansen; don’t make any predictions that can be checked during your professional lifetime
—————————-
I don’t know about that Bob.
It seems if they predict a 35% increase in precipitation in the NE by 2057 (that’s a 1% increase per year over the next 35 years) with Nashville seeing a temperature rise of 3.21 degrees Celsius (that’s almost 1/10 of a degree per year) and Memphis a rise of 2.18 degrees Celsius we should be able to monitor their progress. We should know something by 2020 unless they’re saying no change until 2057 then poof.

According to the predictions made by the organic super computer inside my skull, University of Tennessee professors of environmental propaganda will face increasing cognitive impairment from their continued use of crystal meth, which they claim helps them to see into the future….

Ya know, if someone could rewrite the code in those darned things to expose the super-duper-fast computers to experience the same moisture and heatwaves they predict, this prediction nonsense of gloom and doom could be solved tonight. I would wager that at atmosphere of air conditioned bliss would be in our future.

Make the computer and its owners pay for gloom and doom 50 years hence. Presto, no more gloom and doom and then we could get back to meteorologists telling us when to grab our sweater and umbrellas.

“Thus, it is important that the northeast take actions to mitigate the impact from climate change in the next several decades.”

The contribution of the northeast to mitigation “results” (LOL) could only be minuscule at best. Reading may be fundamental but you’d think scientists would have basic math down pat. Gail Combs is on the right track, climate science has strayed from science similar to alchemy. At the very root of science is the drive to explain phenomena without myth. The alchemist was driven by a search for the philosopher’s stone (& etc.) and climate science seems to driven by a search to feed human arrogance (& etc.).

Granted, the press release makes the whole modeling effort and the conclusions sound silly. However, this comment stream seems to me to be unusually short on substantive criticism and long on cliches (GIGO, supercomputer jokes, etc). Does anyone actually know enough about regional climate modeling to know if the paper (not the press release) has any merit? I don’t, but surely some do, and I would be interested in hearing specific evidence-based criticisms of the paper.

Civil and environmental engineering!!! You all know that civil engineering has been renamed environmental engineering in most Universities for promotional reasons, right? What in the dickens are they letting a bunch of soil mechanics, concrete designers and highway curve surveyors doing anywhere near a super computer! What are their physics/chemistry skills? No wonder I have hair dressers and brick layers arguing with me about global warming and psychologists and sociologists castigating me for my skepticism and offering psychoanalysis of my illness.

With the increasing number of super computers required to maintain credibility in the face of more and more contrary empirical evidence, the heat output of these super-computer behemoths will indeed raise temperatures to the required predicted level.

I am confident that when these two researchers read the peer review comments on WUWT they are not going to be happy. Somewhere along the research trail one needs to apply common sense to the results. It is always a wake up call.

The faith that people have in what comes out of a computer is stunning. But this is nothing new. I wrote my first computer programs in 1980 and was surprised then as to how people simply trusted any result that a computer produced.

I have no problem trusting the results produced by a computer. They do what they’re told. I don’t trust the programmers as far as could comfortably spit out a rat, though.

Climate Science has always required Super Computers to do their work. I guess to make up for their below average abilities. These guys think that they can forecast climate 50 years in the future in a 60 year cycle system. Even a super computer can not make up for their mental insufficiency pg.

“For me the starting point is to recognize the system for what it is – a non linear dynamical dissipative system perpetually out of equilibrium and never in steady state.

Finally the important conclusion is that such a system is deterministic but unpredictable, i.e. (sic) you cannot find a unique solution for the non linear partial equations describing it.
This is an impossibility of principle – it doesn’t matter what is the power of computers or the accuracy of the numerical models.”

Tomas Milanovic

The computers will produce a result but it will be meaningless. He also discussed the possibility that the system may be predictable iff it is ergodic. Which no one is even investigating.

A drop in temperature of ~-0.3C make a lot more sense that this idiocy. Long term we are headed back into an ice age conditions or pretty darn close to ice age conditions. [ link 1 and link 2 ] The Holocene peaked in temperature 8000 years ago and the earth has been cooling since then in fits and starts. An increase of 3C is the entire temperature swing in the Holocene from the peak to the present. It just ain’t going to happen in the next fifty years.

If you look at it another way, the ice age to interglacial temperature swing is ~ 10C and the other interglacials peaked at perhaps a degree higher than the peak of the Holocene.

This paper just doesn’t pass the common sense test. That is why we are ROTFL

Gary Pearse says:
December 17, 2012 at 6:50 pm
Civil and environmental engineering!!! You all know that civil engineering has been renamed environmental engineering in most Universities for promotional reasons, right?

———————————–

When I was an engineering undergrad, it was well known by all engineering students that civil was the place where people went if they were not bright enough to be real engineers, mind you, they were still smarter than the artsies, but not by much by our thinking…

How about objections to unsupported conclusions like my comment above or self aggrandizements like “The regional climate dynamical downscaling technique has been successfully applied to CESM results for the RCP 8.5 climate change scenario to generate high resolution climate outputs.” What could possibly define successful if not the test of predictive skill proved out by time and future reality, surely the mere production of fancy projections aren’t the bar for success in this field?

Unless this turns out to be an intended joke as compared to the unintended one that D. Dooley was as head coach of the UT Football program my UT stickers and front vanity plate are coming off tomorrow.

Unless this is intended as a joke as compared to the unintended joke that D. Dooley turned out to be as head coach of the UT football program my UT stickers and front vanity plate will be coming off my car.

Lucky for them, their computers came up with the right answer. What if they’d shown that in fact nothing much would have changed in 50 years? No more floods, no more droughts. They’d have looked a bit silly.

Two words come to mind – imperious asses. What have they done to science? There was once a time scientists would tell us what they know and it was tempered in uncertainty. Now they tell us what they think and it is intemperate sophistry. They have fooled only themselves. I would give a nut for another Richard Feynman to come into the world.

Somewhere in an alternative universe Douglas Adams is splitting his sides as he realises that even his masterpiece has not envisaged the full farcicality of reality.
Majikthise, Vroomfondel, Loonquawl and Phouchg have just been trumped by FU (shurely a spoof, rude as well) and Gao (say that aloud).

Your post at addressed to Stephen Pruett at December 17, 2012 at 8:27 pm asks

What could possibly define successful if not the test of predictive skill proved out by time and future reality, surely the mere production of fancy projections aren’t the bar for success in this field?

Of course, “the mere production of fancy projections” IS “the bar for success in” so –called ‘climate science’. This is demonstrated by each and every IPCC Working Group 1 Report. And no climate model has any demonstrated predictive skill.

Steve Schaper says:
December 17, 2012 at 11:35 pm
“Am I mistaken, or are they trying to create a finer grid of predictions than presently exist for data?”

they take the state in the coarse grid from a GCM at moment x in time and initialize a finer model with it that they let then run with finer temporal and spatial resolution.

One of the climate “scientists” once called the scenarios of the GCMs not predictions, but “possible stories”; so the models are a way of telling a story about the future. In this regard, Fu and Gao take an overall story and tell an episode of it filled in with more invented detail (invented because the state information of the finer model is of course not taken from any measurement or scientific process but just a “possible story” within a larger “possible story”).

Like blowing up “The Hobbit” into three feature films. As expected, most of the content does not come from Tolkien. (I’m not a fan of those walking movies anyway. I like running movies, like the first ofo the Matrix films.)

Stephen Pruett says:
December 17, 2012 at 6:17 pm
“Does anyone actually know enough about regional climate modeling to know if the paper (not the press release) has any merit?”

I know enough about chaos and models to tell you that what these people do has no predictive value. The normal GCMs already have no predictive skills but these guys have managed to make it worse.

Yet, the story that their computer tells will look very realistic, like a modern CGI movie, and I guess that is what the climate science apparatchiks want to achieve. Trying to get back to the good old days when Al Gore’s mockumentary was able to sell millions of tickets.

Joshua Fu, a civil and environmental engineering professor, and Yang Gao, a graduate research assistant, developed precise scales of cities which act as a climate crystal ball seeing high resolution climate changes almost 50 years into the future.

This is good because they would have been long retired. This is how you do it folks.

For the 23 states east of the Mississippi River, they analyzed the present-day climate from 2001 to 2004 and predicted the future climate from 2057 to 2059.

Silly me, I thought even the IPCC and WMO uses a period of 30 years for climate. 4 years is now climate. Unbelievable crap.

The only time those “Models” will derive or achieve any credibility, is when they can accurately demonstrate the weather yesterday. Something they appear to be incapable of achieving due to the varied and compulsive manipulations of the data.
At this point in time, they are equivalent to crystal ball gazing, Astrology and Voodoo incantations. Maybe one day we will see the opposite of “Garbage in/Prophecy Out”.

squid2112 says:
December 17, 2012 at 7:53 pm
“…both the Northeast and Southeast will see a drastic increase in precipitation.

…I find this hilarious! .. they were just telling us (here in Nashville) this past summer that we were all doomed from “permanent drought” … good grief! … give me an F’ing break already….”

Don’t worry, another highly regarded group of “scientists” will run an even bigger and more expensive super computer and get even more “accurate and precise” model predictions further into the future which will be the complete opposite to these highly “accurate and precise” predicitons.

Just imagine the people who have reacted to all the nonsense of CAGW gloom and doom to the extent that it has had a negative impact on their lives. Totally irresponsible to continue this “the sky is falling” fear rhetoric. It creates hopelessness and guilt.

Well, in Maritime Canada (Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island) the meteorologists / climate scientists using dynamic downscaling are predicting temperatures for 2100 on a town by town basis with the towns 20 – 50 kms apart. Temperatures up to 8 deg. C higher than now. It is utter rubbish but it is what the government is using. Drinking the cool aid I would say.

Actually, winners of horse races and super bowls would be easier. For one thing, the developer of this predictive algorithm probably would feed “past” data into it and see if the predictions were accurate, unlike the climate change people. I doubt they would share data any more than climate scientists, however!

Did anyone notice that the supercomputer predicted a 35% increase on average in precipitation with the most at the coast? The coastal amount was listed as 150mm. Two problems! First, 35% of precipitation in this part of the country is a number 2.5 to 3 times 150mm. Second, 150mm is within the natural variability. 600mm extra in four years happens often. So does 600mm less. Still, how can a supercomputer take 35% of the 40 to 50 annual inch rainfall and get an answer of 6?

Sorry to burden the rest of you with the high-jinx our science hillbillies. The Bredesen Center and increasingly the Oak Ridge National Laboratory are excellent examples of money and politics corrupting science. Oak Ridge of course was the home of The Manhatten Project and has since focused on supporting the nuclear industry without limits. The Bredesen Center is a pass-through for state and federal funding of renewable energy and climate science. It’s inception goes back to our once young Congressman Al Gore and former Senate Majority Leader Howard Baker. As Monckton tells us of Thatcher and nuclear so it has been here. We need to find a way to defund both of these useless money pits.

There has got to be a way, before this sort of crap is allowed onto the public domain, for it to be screened and challenged. Without such accountability, the university is engaging in misleading and deceptive conduct.

Mervyn: No way without censoring the press. The media loves doomsday and will use any lie or truth that pushes for said agenda. The ONLY defense against any of this is an educated population. Allowing the greens to take over schools was huge mistake and will be hard to overcome. Right now, the internet is the main defense, until someone starts filling classrooms with teachers that are not political “true believers”.